Linux Slowsdown?

As everybody already knows, I just installed RH9 a few weeks ago. So far I've been pretty satisfied, but just today my laptop suddenly started slowing down, and I can't find any explaination. Is there any kind of spyware or virus that could do this?

Its possible you've now got a lot of services running in the background or the filesystem is damaged. Could you look at top (a command line programme) and see is there anything suspicious or anything using a lot of processor power? Or RAM for that matter

I think it's a memory leak in Firefox PR1.0, because I just updated, and it appears that Firefox is what's slowing everything down. Has anyone else had this problem? I'm going to check Bugzilla right now

I've not had memory leaks on BeOS, but from my own experience on Debian, the FF1.0PR builds for Linux were terrible, incredibly unstable and unreliable.

Then again, people are always saying that FF leaks on Windows when its just the caching system. People are so paranoid about having half their RAM empty when they have RAM for a reason - for programmes to use it. I'm quite proud of my BeOS install using 20% of my RAM when idling because I know half the damn OS is RAM cached.

During the time I've used 1.0PR in Linux, ie. since it was released, it has crashed once.

I guess the slowdown occurs because there's something going on in the background, an automatically scheduled job like file slocate database updating.

The next time it happens, open a terminal window and type ps -Aly, paste or attach the output here (you can select the text with mouse in GUI consoles). It prints out quite detailed information about running processes in the machine.